


Kaleidoscope Eyes (sparkle at the world)

by serenadreams



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-10 00:40:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5562121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenadreams/pseuds/serenadreams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How a blind girl teaches Oliver to see in color again.</p><p>Drabbles set in the 'blind flower stall girl' universe. Finally collated in one place!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. flowers

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not writing this story in a linear fashion, so be prepared for a lot of jumping around!

He’s lost when he sees her. He’s drowning in a world of gray, a world filled with nothing but pain and loss. And he sees her and all he can see are colors. With a gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans and a knife strapped to his ankle, he’s nothing but darkness. But she’s… She’s that silly cliché, that the sight of something beautiful can heal any scar.

Yellow hair, curling and unruly from the humidity, tumbles around her shoulders. Her dress is red and blue. Her laugh is every color of the rainbow.

It’s a flower stall of all things, in the middle of a Saturday street market. He’s got blood on his hands, literally, he wiped it on his dark cargo pants, but he can still feel it on his fingers. He’s left a man dead mere minutes before, a bad man, a man who brought more pain to more people than Oliver ever has, but a man nonetheless. He snuffed a light out without flinching, only to walk out into the sunshine and stumble upon the brightest star he’s ever seen.

He hates himself with every step he takes towards her. Hates to watch the darkness that travels with him like a cloud draw close to something so innocent.

She’s young, younger than him, too young to be messed with by someone as damaged as he. Too young to be broken. Too young to be obliterated.

But he doesn’t stop walking closer.

She talks to everyone who approaches her stall, with a smile on lips that seem to run away from her at every opportunity. She blushes too. Her cheeks turning pink, animated hands with painted nails punctuating everything she says with a gesture.

There’s a boy sitting to her right, and a dog standing alert to her left. Oliver’s glad she has protectors; maybe they’ll stop him before he can turn all those colors dark.

He’s too close. Too close to losing the last shred of him that still remembers what it means to be human, that still remembers the things that matter. There’s a horrible, selfish part of him that thinks maybe she’s exactly what he needs. Someone beautiful and light to fix him before it’s too late.

He reaches her before he can turn back, and then that smile is directed at him and his heart is doing things it hasn’t done in years.

“Hi! What are you looking for today?” She’s so goddamn perky, so full of life and joy and it hurts him as much as it heals him.

He needs to leave.

He should walk away, right now.

But he doesn’t. It’s warm in her bubble of sunlight.

His eyes find hers. Blue and clear and endless.

And unseeing.

She looks right at him, but there’s no focus in her gaze. Perhaps that’s why she’s still smiling at him, she hasn’t seen the wreck of a man that stands before her. She doesn’t know to shrink away in fear, from someone so clearly dangerous.

Because she can’t see him.

“A gift for a girlfriend?” She wonders, fingers tapping against lightly against the table.

It takes him a long moment to find his voice, and when he does it’s raspy and hoarse.

“No, nothing like that. I…” He looks down at the flowers in front of him, buckets of them in every color and shape he can think of. He can only name one or two different varieties, a distant memory of his mother fussing over an ornate vase filled with carnations and roses. “Could I have one of each?”

She arches an eyebrow at him and tilts her head to the side, her eyes blink up at him and he gazes back, wondering how it could be possible that something so expressive is without sight. Her lips curl up into a smile, and he feels like she’s learning his every secret with one look… sound, sense?

“One of each? I like it.” She says, and he finds himself smiling back at her.

It’s a barely-there lift of his lips but it’s more than he’s done in longer than he cares to remember. For a beautiful blind girl in the middle of a Saturday street market.

He’s aware of the boy to her side watching him carefully, and the dog, a guide dog he realizes now, resting its head against her leg, but all he can focus on is her. Delicate hands quickly pluck a flower from each bucket, confident and unfaltering. And he watches as the colors come together, a mismatched bouquet that’s everything he isn’t.

It’s beautiful.

He’s going to take it and leave. He’ll keep the memory of her little patch of sunlight and nothing more. He’ll turn around and walk back the way he came, back to the mission, back to his life of following orders and losing his soul. Whatever’s left of it.

He won’t drag her down with him. This beautiful enigma, a little shard of hope.

He’ll take the flowers and leave.

But then her fingers brush his as she hands him the bouquet, and his feet forget how to move.

“I’m Oliver.”


	2. hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> skip into the future a while...

He holds his breath as her fingers move over his face. Her eyes are closed, her head canted slightly to the side. Her skin is so soft against his, her touch so gentle. It aches, to have such kindness directed towards him. Towards someone so clearly undeserving.

Her fingers trace down across his cheekbones, rubbing lightly through the stubble on his jaw. Her thumb brushes against his lower lip and he breathes a sigh that he knows she’ll feel against her skin. Her answering smile is soft and he returns it even though she can’t see that he does.

She maps the line of his nose, before carefully exploring the delicate skin around his eyes. His lashes brush against her fingers when he blinks and she laughs softly, sweetly.

Everything about her is so damn _sweet_.

“Are those butterfly kisses you’re giving me, Mr. Queen?”

He’s not sure how he got here. Not sure how he found himself safe in the home of this beautiful girl with her laughter warm in his ears. He tried to leave, tried to walk away before he dragged her in too deep and tangled her up in his dangerous web of destruction and death. But she’s like a magnet, everything she does a healing balm to his wounds, old and new.

He catches her wrist in his hand and moves it so she can feel the flutter of his lashes against her skin, as he blinks in quick succession. She grins, all pink lipstick and pearly teeth.

Oh if they could see him now, enemies or allies, the man who’s struck fear into the hearts of many with a steady hand and calculated violence. If they could see him here, pressing butterfly kisses to the soft skin of a smiling girl in a polka dot sundress, with something resembling reverence in his eyes.

He’s unused to being gentle with people, unused to a touch that doesn’t result in pain. But with her, he’s so careful. _So_ gentle. She’s precious, soft and vulnerable and trusting. She trusts _him_. Enough to let him into her home, enough to tangle her fingers with his, enough to chatter about her life and her thoughts, enough to tuck a hand into his elbow and let him guide her across streets and through crowds.

Her senses continue to amaze him at every turn, her understanding of the world around her so clear, despite her disadvantage. But the concept of _blind faith_ was lost on him until he met her. Not simply because it’s something no one’s ever thought to invest in him, but because it was nothing more than a metaphor thrown carelessly into conversation. Until she lets him see her at her most vulnerable, relying on her instincts and trusting him to keep her from harm.

It’s as powerful as it is terrifying, and nothing in his life has ever felt better.

Her hands fall away, and in turn he raises his own, large enough to encompass her whole face,  roughened thumbs brushing across flushed cheeks. He hesitates, taking in her closed eyes, her parted lips. He leans down until his mouth is an inch from hers, and he can feel her slightly uneven breaths against his skin. And then she closes the gap, and her lips meet his, soft and warm and welcoming. His heart stutters in his chest, and he feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room, but it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t need to breathe to kiss her.

She tastes like salvation.

She’s a drug, every time he sees her, he wants more. But he’ll take what he can get and thank a God he doesn’t believe in for every second he spends in her company.

Her lips move against his and she sighs into the kiss, a hand gripping his arm as she shifts closer.

She couldn’t be more different than him if she tried. Light and colorful, so, _so_ trusting, so open. She throws her heart out into the world with abandon, uncaring of the scars it might receive, she wants the good experiences, and will take the pain that will inevitably come along with them. She’s far stronger than him. Not physically, with her terrifyingly breakable body and tendency to stumble headfirst into danger, but in every other way imaginable. She’s resilient against pain and loss, never allowing her colors to be swallowed by the darkness.

Her strength warms him whenever she’s close. Just as her light pushes his shadows into the corners of his mind and her laughter erases scars he never knew existed.

He can train and fight and destroy and kill, but he’s never felt stronger than when he’s holding her sweet face in his hands and kissing her with all the care his battered soul possesses.  


	3. coffee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> anonymous said: something soft and sweet in the blind flower girl universe?? xx

 

He rarely joins her in sleep, partly because it’s never been something that comes easily to him. Years spent looking over his shoulder leaving him anxious to allow himself to be that vulnerable. But also because now he has another reason to stay awake when the stars light up the sky.

It terrifies him, how beautiful she is, how completely flawless. And not because it’s _true_ , but because it isn’t. She’s not flawless. She talks without thinking, she trips over thin air, she bites her nails, her feet are slightly different sizes, she gets bad tempered if she doesn’t eat regularly. But all of those flaws simply add up to make something so completely perfect to him, _for him_ , that he doesn’t really know what to do.

It terrifies him because he could lose her, and if he does, he knows no one else will ever live up to her. No one will ever come close.

It terrifies him because she’s all he ever wanted without even knowing it, and now that he has her, nothing else matters.

So he stays awake, as the hours tick by, night into morning, watching the soft rise of her chest, the way her hair tangles across the pillow, her fingers twitching against the sheets.

He could watch her forever, fascinated by every slight movement, every small expression that crosses her lovely face. Perhaps it’s creepy, to many others, he’s sure it would be. But she never seems to mind. When her eyes finally blink open, her stomach growling for breakfast and her nose scrunching in distaste at the early hour, she never minds that he’s there. Her eyes, unseeing as they might be, always settle straight on him, her hands instinctively reaching to fold into his. 

He’s not sure how she can always tell exactly where he is, but she can.

She can tell a lot, despite her so-called handicap. She can tell when he’s upset or angry, and can soothe him with soft touches of her small fingers across his skin. She can tell when he’s drowned in fear of his old life catching up to them, of all his enemies pulling her down into the darkness where she’ll never belong. There’s not much she can do to calm those fears, but she does her best, nevertheless. She can tell when he’s near, even when they’re in a crowd of people, she can always pick him out from the rest. She says she recognizes his smell, a mixture of leather and aftershave, but he wonders if it’s something more.

A bird sings outside the window and he watches as she shifts beside him in bed, mumbling something unintelligible in her sleep. He smiles, another thing he never did before her. He didn’t have anything to smile about before he met Felicity. But true to her name, she’s a happiness he never dreamed he’d experience. And now he finds himself smiling and laughing, and feeling comfortable in ways he didn’t even knew were possible.

Careful not to wake her, he climbs from the bed, intent on turning on the coffee pot in the kitchen, knowing that her alarm will shrill in a couple of minutes. There’s a domestic side to their relationship that he absolutely loves. Like the fact that he knows the exact way she likes her coffee, and always makes sure she has a cup whenever she wants one.

He can’t resist lightly dragging the tip of his finger across the curve of her cheek before he leaves the room. Her skin is so impossibly soft, her features so unbelievably beautiful that it almost hurts him. She looks like an angel, lying there, so calm, so warm.

Brushing a few strands of hair behind her ear, he leans down and presses a gentle kiss against her temple, before finally dragging himself away.

Their house is full of flowers, and the colors catch his eye as he passes. The soft smell of lilies blending pleasantly with coffee as it starts to brew. 

Oliver knows he doesn’t really fit in here. In her life, her beautiful life that everyone wants to be a part of. His world is so much darker, so much colder and worthless than hers. And the thought of them blending is unthinkable. But he’s never been able to leave. Back in the beginning he tried a few times, determined to keep her from harm, even if that harm was him. But for all her soft clumsiness, she’s a force to be reckoned with when she wants to be. It was her life, and in her words, if she wanted him to be a part of it, he would be. 

So he is. He’s fitted himself into her world, her house, her heart, and he never wants to leave. 

The coffee pot beeps just as the alarm in their bedroom starts to sing. The sound of her tired groan brings a smile to his face, and he quickly grabs her favorite mug from the cupboard, carefully putting together her favored sweet latte, before making his way back to her. 

She’s tangled up in the sheets, one hand strewn out over his side of the bed, the clock silenced beside her. Just as always, her extraordinary senses alert her of his presence before he announces it, and she pulls herself up until she’s sitting against the headboard, her fingers reaching out towards him, making childlike grabby hands for the coffee. 

He chuckles at her antics and carefully places the cup in her hands, leaning down just as she turns her face up, their lips meeting in a sweet morning kiss that’s so tender and soft it hits him right in the chest. 

“You’re the best.” She mumbles around a sip of the hot beverage, and he settles back down beside her, wrapping an arm around her small frame and tugging gently until she leans against his side. 

“You’re perfect.” He replies, grinning when she turns and presses a kiss into his bare bicep.

“You’re ridiculous.” 

The easy banter goes on, as she drinks her coffee and the birds chirp outside. It’s a moment of peaceful contentment that they both wish would never end.

  
But like all good things, it eventually must.


	4. terrified

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: something about felicity stumbling into danger in the blind flower stall au?

 

Even with all her fire and ferocious strength, she’s terrifyingly vulnerable. It scares him, how easy it would be to hurt her. It’s a part of his brain he can’t turn off. The part trained to seek out the ways in, the points of weakness. And he knows he’s not the only one who thinks that way.

He sees her vulnerability, and while he aches to protect her, to preserve her in all her colors, he knows that there are many who will have darker intentions.

It keeps him up at night. Thinking of all the ways someone could steal her from him.

Her dog, _Dig_ , is a fighter, but even a German Shepherd can be taken down with some simple forethought. And then there’s just Felicity. And God knows she’s stronger than him. Her mind and her soul and her heart are a force to be reckoned with. But it’s her body that scares him. Because physically, she’s so fucking fragile.

And she can’t run from danger like any other girl can. She can’t see an attack coming, can’t see the darkening in a man’s eyes, can’t see any of it until it’s too late.

It’s only when she’s with him, her small hand tucked into the crook of his arm, that he feels like he can breathe again.

He likes being her eyes.

It’s an imbalanced trade really, since she’s his heart.

But then she’ll be out of his sight again and that fear will rise hard and hot, fingers itching to hold her close, to stand between her and the rest of the world.

It’s a new thing for him, being a protector. For so long, too long, he’s been the one that people fear, the darkness that others need protection _from_. And now he has something so precious, so easily lost, and he’s terrified because he doesn’t really know how to do any of this. He doesn’t know how to be the good guy. How to be somebody worthy of her, somebody who deserves to stand between her and harm.

But when he opens his door to find her tearful and bruised, the rage that courses through him is unlike anything he’s ever felt.

There’s a welt across her cheek, dark red already fading to blue, a small trickle of blood leaking from a split lip and mixing with the tears falling steadily from her wide eyes. Dig is barking incessantly at her side, and her trembling fingers are wrapped around his leash like it’s the only thing tethering her to the earth.

“Felicity.” Her name tumbles desperately from his lips and she instinctively takes a step towards him.

His own hands shake when he reaches for her. Fear, so intense and crippling that it makes him dizzy, warring with a burning, primal anger that will leave men cowering in its wake.

He cups her face, her beautiful, tragic face, tilting it up until he can bring his own to rest against it. She lets out a quiet sob at the contact, eyes squeezing shut.

“Oliver.” It’s a mixture of a sigh of relief and a plea, and the plaintive sound just breaks him even further.

He pulls away, running his hands down her arms until he can tangle his fingers with hers. And then he guides her inside, marveling as always at the way she follows him with such literal blind faith. Dig trots beside them as he leads her to the couch, a slight limp in the dog’s gait.

She’s shivering, goose bumps and bruises mixing together on skin that should never be marked.

Once she’s settled on the couch, he allows himself a moment to breathe, a moment to contain the beast in his chest that’s raging for a kill. Because he can’t be that man right now, he needs to be the good man, the one Felicity sees when she looks at him, not the one he sees in the mirror.

As soon as he feels like he can unclench his fists, he kneels before her, carefully cataloging her injuries. They’re minor, in comparison to others he’s seen. But there’s nothing minor about seeing her hurt.

The urge for revenge has never been so strong. He’s never taken pleasure in another man’s pain, but when he finds who touched her, who scared her, who made her smiling face turn sad…

She leans forward, turning her head into him and resting the side of her face against his shoulder, her nose pressed just beneath his jaw. He can feel the warmth of her breath on his neck, and the dampness of her cheek through his shirt.

The rush of protectiveness that rises in his chest is fearsome. She’s precious to him in a way no one has ever been before.

“Tell me what happened.” He whispers into her hair, refusing to break the contact between them, needing the feel of her skin against his.

He’s _terrified_ of losing her.

“My purse.” She cries, and he glances around, noting the absence of her favorite bag.

“Someone took it?” He runs a soothing hand over her head, gently tangling his fingers in the golden curls that fall down her back.

“Two men. My phone… I spent so long getting it to work well for me, and my braille kindle and…”

He tried to make himself leave her, a few weeks ago, thinking that she’d be safer with him out of her life. Because surely someone with such a dark past can only bring her pain. But she’s sobbing into his shirt, and her delicate skin is mottled with shades of blue and it had nothing to do with him. It wasn’t because of who he is, who he _was_. It was just because she’s small and trusting and such an easy target for the worst aspects of the world.

She got hurt and she wouldn’t have been safer if he left her. In fact, if he’d been with her at the time, it never would have happened.

“It’s okay. I’ll get you a new phone. And a new kindle. It’s okay.” He accompanies each promise with a kiss to her tearful face and slowly she calms, until he can see that patented Smoak strength seeping back into her bones.

Moving to sit beside her on the couch, he pulls her into his lap, wrapping both arms around her and resting in the knowledge that she’ll be alright.

Her skin might be bruised, her pride might be wounded, but she’ll be okay. Because she’s the strongest woman he’s ever known.

Dig rests his head on her knee, and he reaches a hand down to give the dog a pat.

He’ll fix them both up in a second. Get out a first aid kit and attend to their injuries, then find some food for the two of them and maybe a glass of wine for Felicity.

But he needs a moment first.

A moment to just feel her in his arms, feel her heart beating against his, her hands bunched in his shirt.

He’s _terrified_ of how much he loves her.


End file.
